A root cause of premature ageing degradation can be traced often to a lack of communication, documentation, and coordination between design, operation, and maintenance organizations. This results from the general situation that, except for major SSCs (such as fuel channels), there is not explicit responsibility on one plant person to achieve a specific SSC lifetime.

The effectiveness of SSC ageing management can be significantly improved and its service life significantly extended by the coordination of all relevant programmes and activities. This coordination generally requires a modest engineering investment in order to understand and take into account the design assumptions/ limitations, significant ageing mechanisms and the impact of operation and maintenance activities on these mechanisms and the rate of SSC degradation.